Think of all the great talk show hosts of our day — Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, David Letterman, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas. They all have one thing in common that could be a factor in their success:
No facial hair.
These clean-shaven gents were unencumbered by the grooming routine needed to keep mustaches, beards and goatees trimmed and neat, giving them more time to focus on guests, monologues, comedy bits and other aspects of their shows.
Say what you will about the quality of HBO’s “Dennis Miller Live,” but imagine how that show would be if its host didn’t have that scruffy-looking goatee. And remember syndicated talker Gordon Elliott? He went from peach fuzz to a beard, and where is his show now?
Howie Mandel knows what makes a good talk show work. Sure, you need an engaging host, stimulating entertainment and enticing discussions. But appearance is everything.
“I’m going to do a very traditional talk show,” Mandel says. “And `goats’ don’t fall in the column of tradition.”
When “The Howie Mandel Show” premieres Monday, it will be with a Mandel sans the maniacal-looking goatee he’s been wearing for the last few years.
“My wife liked it, too,” Mandel says of the now-fallen facial hair.
“I will be clean-shaven, and hopefully acceptable to a wider audience,” proclaims Mandel, 42, best known for his high-energy standup comedy act. “I’m not the goat; I’m who I am. So I was happy to shave and look like a host and look like my heroes. I want to look like Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.”
Good man, Mandel. He came across a poll that found women weren’t as trusting of people with facial hair as those without. “And I think that goes for men and women,” he joked.
“He’ll have to shave every day, and he hasn’t done that in years,” says Joachim Blunck, an executive producer of “The Howie Mandel Show” on the lengths Mandel will go to make his show a hit.
The fact that Mandel is doing a talk show at all — with or without a goatee — might come as a surprise to some. But the comic realized how the format was “perfect” for him after he sat in for Regis Philbin for a week on “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee” more than a year ago.
“Every day presented itself with a new adventure, in as far as new guests, new things that I wanted to do,” Mandel says.
Afterward, he says, he was besieged with offers to front a talk-variety show. It was “kismet,” he says, “because that was exactly the time that I decided in my life this was something that I was ready for, something that I want to do, something that I’m comfortable with.”
Mandel has been a jack-of-all-trades for the last several years. When he wasn’t doing standup at theaters around the country, he was either acting, writing and providing voices for his successful animated Fox series “Bobby’s World,” using the character of little Bobby for a series of educational CD-ROMs, or churning out comedy cable specials.
But Mandel is putting practically all of that on the back burner to focus on the talk show. One would think Mandel might miss such eclectic activities, but the comic says doing “Regis & Kathie Lee” proved he could find all that he needed creatively.
“If I wanted to perform in front of a live audience, they were there. If I wanted to meet people and sit back, that was there. If I wanted to go out and shoot a video, that was there. So I had all the frenetic elements of my career all in one venue, without traveling.”
The traveling was another reason Mandel decided to take a talk show gig. Married for almost 20 years and with three children, he has reached a point where he would rather spend time with his family than travel.
Mandel will tape his show in Burbank — not far from his Los Angeles home — in Johnny Carson’s Studio 1, and where Mandel himself made more than 20 appearances on his idol’s “The Tonight Show.”
Mandel is also high on a talk show because it allows him to be himself. For the most part, when audiences encounter the entertainer, he is either in his overblown standup comedy persona or he is hiding behind a character or a voice. But the “Regis & Kathie Lee” stint found Mandel dropping his various facades.
“I liked being allowed to be Howie,” the Toronto native says. “I’ve never been allowed to be just me and maybe even carry on a conversation like I’m having with you right now.”
The persona viewers will see on “The Howie Mandel Show” will “probably be closest to who he really is,” says Blunck, 43, an Emmy award-winning veteran of the genre who created the “Fox After Breakfast” morning show for that network.
“I think what you’ll see on the air, which is very important in daytime, is that genuine family man who you can get to like on a much more intimate and personal level. And success in shows like this usually depends on the audience making that kind of connection with the host.”
The studio audience will be so connected to Mandel, they will serve as his collective sidekick. Initially, “The Howie Mandel Show” had announced that actress Brianne Leary, a former correspondent for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” would serve as Mandel’s side-person. But during test shows, Mandel found himself striking up conversations with the audience — and the audience responding nicely.
“In test shows we put somebody in place so that I could say, `You know, I came home and you know what my wife did?’ or `You know, I’m raising a teenage daughter and how would you…?’ And then what happened was I also started asking the audience the same thing, and lo and behold, the audience and different members of the audience became my sidekick.”
Audiences may be allowed to participate in discussions with such celebrities as “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston, Paul Reiser of “Mad About You,” country singer Clint Black and others who are scheduled to appear the first week.
Mandel knows he will be sized up against Rosie O’Donnell, with whom Mandel shares the talk-variety format. (He would never try to do a serious talk show: “I would think if somebody has an issue or a problem, I would not be the man to see.”)
Mandel recognizes that if O’Donnell hadn’t revitalized daytime variety-talk, he probably wouldn’t have received his opportunity. (He also credits “Regis & Kathie Lee” for giving him the chance to test the waters in the first place.)
But it is his hope that audiences will be receptive of him, like they are of O’Donnell. After all, several people have succeeded in this type of show before — although not too many with facial hair.
“When I started out (in standup), I was doing Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore, and they all co-existed successfully for many years,” Mandel says. “So I’m just hoping there’s room for a lot of us.”
